


your hands can heal, your hands can bruise (i don't have a choice, but i'd still choose you)

by crystalesbian



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-24
Updated: 2015-04-24
Packaged: 2018-03-25 14:50:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3814513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crystalesbian/pseuds/crystalesbian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They are just two kids who grew up too fast and who are clinging to each other to feel something. // Bellamy and Raven after Mount Weather.</p>
            </blockquote>





	your hands can heal, your hands can bruise (i don't have a choice, but i'd still choose you)

**Author's Note:**

> I really love these two together, and I've been wanting to write something for them for a while. I meant this to be a short few hundred words and ended up churning out 1.7k. Oops.

She is fire and she is a windstorm.

She is cries of agony and fiery explosions and a single star falling down to earth.

She is steady, diligent work. She is floating. She is shrieks of joy.

Raven Reyes is strong and capable and a fighter and she is also terrified and insecure and crumbling down in places she thinks no one can see.

And sometimes, she is still.

She is still a lot after Mount Weather.

She is sitting in the grass just outside of camp, arms holding her knees, facing straight ahead. Her breathing is steady and her face is blank. Her hair is held back tightly in a ponytail, but there are still a few loose strands blowing around her face. She shivers, and it’s the first time he sees her move since he’d come across her. He makes his way over and sits down in the grass next to her.

She doesn’t say anything, doesn’t acknowledge him, doesn’t make a move. She is a statue.

“Everything okay?” Bellamy asks her, staring ahead as she is doing.

“Yes.” It’s a robotic response. She doesn’t look at him when she says it.

“Thinking?”

“No.” A little more human this time, though she still doesn’t move.

“Ah.” He nods. She’s been coming out here a lot lately. He hasn’t been following her, but her absence is a difficult thing not to notice, and this isn’t the first time he’s happened to see her sitting out here staring off without moving, so he can assume this is where she comes during those hours she disappears without reason. He studies her carefully. “Are you watching for Clarke?”

She finally looks to him, a smirk on her face which is somehow able to convey both sorrow and amusement. Her lip is turned up, but her eyes are sad. “No,” she answers, finally speaking with a human voice. She looks back off into the distance with a different face. Her eyes are squinted, her lips pursed. Now she is looking for Clarke. “Do you think she’s alright out there?” she asks him softly. She shakes her head, getting up off the grass and shoving her hands in her jacket pockets. “No, that’s exactly the kind of stuff I come here to get away from.” For a second she moves like she’s about to turn and start walking back toward camp, but she sits back down next to Bellamy, resuming her position from before.

She still looks restless, unable to sink back into her previous state of blankness. Her mouth twitches and she squeezes her eyes shut and opens them again. Her breathing isn’t quite even, and she’s repeatedly clenching and unclenching her fists. She’s trying to be a statue again, but can’t quite seem to manage it. He puts it together. Meditation. “So, you come out here to not think?” 

“I come out here to get some goddamn peace,” she snaps back. She shakes her head quickly a few times, then stares straight ahead, trying to be still once more.

Her fists are still clenching by her side. He lays his hand over one of them. She starts, looking at him. “Thanks,” she says. “Habit. I don’t realize when I’m doing it.” She looks down at the ground in front of her, then towards the mountains. “Do you think she’ll come back?”

He stiffens. “Of course she will. She’s Clarke.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.” Raven sighs. “I’m not your sister, Bellamy. You don’t have to lie to make me feel better. Doesn’t do shit when I know better.”

“She’ll come back.”

“I don’t think so.” Her eyes are glistening. A tear spills over. “Fuck,” she mutters, wiping the tears away and rolling her eyes at herself.

He curls his hand around hers. “She will. Maybe not soon. Maybe not for a long time. But Clarke will come back.”

“If she’s even still alive.” He looks at her, shocked. Of course the thought had occurred to him, it had probably occurred to all of them, but Raven is the first person to say it out loud. “If she hasn’t been stabbed by a grounder or mauled by a bear or starved to death.” He tightens his grip on her hand. She shocks him again by turning her head and looking directly at him, her eyes meeting his. “How do you have faith in other people, Bellamy?” she asks. “How are you even capable of that?”

He swallows. “I don’t have faith in most people. I don’t have faith in hardly anything.”

“That’s more faith than I have.” She laughs bitterly. “There’s not a single thing I can rely on other than myself. And lately, sometimes not even that.”

He doesn’t have anything to say to that. He looks away and lowers his head. Silence.

“How old are you, Bellamy?” she asks him after a few minutes.

It’s such a simple question that he almost can’t make sense of it. “Twenty-three.”

“I’m nineteen.” She says. He hears her sniffle and he realizes she’s crying. “ _God_ , I’m nineteen.” She’s letting her tears fall freely and leans her head to rest on Bellamy’s shoulder. The sobs are not rocking her body, and she chokes them out like laughs. This is not the violent crying out of pain that he felt rip through her as he held her after they watched Finn die. This is a quiet, respectful weeping. Mourning for her lost youth. Nineteen is too young to have lost faith in the world. Too young to have so much taken away from her. Too young to have so many ghosts.

Of course, twenty-three isn’t much older.

He holds her head and lets her rest her forehead in the crook of his neck. There’s a strong gust of wind and she shivers again, huddling closer to him. He takes his right arm out of its jacket sleeve so he can pull it around the both of them.

“I hate that,” she says, voice still raw. “It keeps getting colder by the day.”

“It’s getting to be winter.”

“I know that!” she snaps, rolling her eyes. “I passed Earth Skills. Doesn’t mean I have to like it.” She pauses. “How cold do you think it’ll get?”

“Pretty damn cold,” he says. It’s only the beginning of December. If he remembers correctly, winter doesn’t even officially begin until late December.

“Do you think it’ll snow?”

“Probably.”

“I’m surprised it hasn’t already. We’re far enough up North for it. It’d be nice to see it.” She shivers again. “Probably won’t feel nice, though.”

He takes the rest of his jacket off and drapes it over her shoulders, getting up and extending a hand to her. “Let’s walk around. It’ll warm us up.”

She takes his hand and stands, his jacket falling off her shoulders. She picks it up off the ground and hands it to him.

“Keep it,” he tells her.

She rolls her eyes. “I have my own, Bellamy. You’ll be freezing without it.”

“I’ll manage.”

“I’m not walking around in two jackets while you have none. Don’t be an idiot.”

He sighs, taking it from her and putting it back on. “You’re too damn stubborn for your own good.”

“And I plan to stay that way.” She smiles.

They start walking, heading into the woods. He doesn’t worry about any surprise attacks— he has his gun on him, and he’s walked this path enough times to know there’s nothing lurking here. This is his meditation. He isn’t one to find comfort in stillness. Of course, he didn’t think Raven was either.

As they’re walking, Raven’s hand finds his, and laces her fingers in his. He doesn’t react. Her hand is cold, but he figures his is too. They walk hand in hand until she stops, jerking him back to face her. They stare at each other for a good, long moment. She steps closer to him until he can feel her breath. She moves a hand up behind his head and runs it through his hair and she kisses him. It is gentle and sweet and is nothing like the kisses they’ve shared before, rough and desperate. He pulls her closer to him by her waist and kisses her back. He pulls away briefly. “What about—”

“Wick?” she finishes his thought. “Wick is nothing.”

“Like I was nothing?”

“Yes,” she says simply, looking up at him. Her hands have moved from his hair to the back of his neck to pressed against his chest, and she’s started kissing his neck. “But you’re not nothing now,” she whispers, breath hot against his neck.

“Even if I was, it wouldn’t matter,” he replies softly, caressing the small of her back. She is not a girl he has to be in love with in order to be with. She is certainly not a girl he has to have be in love with him. She is only Raven, and he doesn’t need commitment from her, he just needs this moment to remain here and now. That, he thinks smugly, is the difference between him and Wick (though really, Wick is the last thing he’s concentrated on right now). Wick wants something from Raven, be it love or a future or physical intimacy. Bellamy, right now, just wants Raven.

She pulls away and he sees her smile. “I’m glad.” She kisses him on the mouth and her hands are back in his hair.

He savors this moment of her lips on his, and for a second he feels like they are really nineteen and twenty-three, that they are young, that they are two horny kids making out in the woods and not two people who’ve been through hell and back carrying the world on their shoulders, who grew up too fast, who are touching each other just to feel something because everyone they love is vanishing one by one and they don’t know if one of them might be next.

She breaks the kiss and shoves her hands in her pockets. “We should get back to camp,” she says, and turns around to start back. He follows behind her, and she has just a little more bounce in her step than before.


End file.
